Identifying conservation technology needs, barriers, and opportunities

Amid accelerating threats to species and ecosystems, technology advancements to monitor, protect, and conserve biodiversity have taken on increased importance. While most innovations stem from adaptation of off-the-shelf devices, these tools can fail to meet the specialized needs of conservation and research or lack the support to scale beyond a single site. Despite calls from the conservation community for its importance, a shift to bottom-up innovation driven by conservation professionals remains limited. We surveyed practitioners, academic researchers, and technologists to understand the factors contributing to or inhibiting engagement in the collaborative process of technology development and adoption for field use and identify emerging technology needs. High cost was the main barrier to technology use across occupations, while development of new technologies faced barriers of cost and partner communication. Automated processing of data streams was the largest emerging need, and respondents focused mainly on applications for individual-level monitoring and automated image processing. Cross-discipline collaborations and expanded funding networks that encourage cyclical development and continued technical support are needed to address current limitations and meet the growing need for conservation technologies.

What best describes your research focus? Select all that apply.

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What best desribes the organization that you work for?
Years of experience in your field. Field refers to the field most related to your use of conservation technology.
If you found this survey to be valuable and would like to send it to others, please add contact email addresses here. We will add them to our distribution list. What types of collaborators do you work with to use technologies in conservation research and practice? Select all that apply.

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In what context do you work with these groups to implement conservation technologies?

Non-Dev Questions
Did you experience any limitations that prevented you from taking part in conservation technology projects? Select all that apply.

Conservation Partners
Field-based/local conservation group  Figure 1. Summary of responses to the question "How often do you encounter technical issues with each of the following technology features?". To summarize the data, the frequency of feature issues are condensed into three categories: Always/Often, Sometimes/Rarely/Never, and Not Applicable. Based on these categories, over 50% of respondents experience issues always or often with every feature. Cost is the most frequent issue (77% always/often), but is also the most commonly reported as not applicable (16%). Issues with power e ciency (73% always/often) and durability (69%) were also common.  SM Table 6. Odds of a high development priority rank for di erent features when designing conservation technologies. Feature priority rankings were assessed using an ordinal regression with logit link. Coe cients are shown as odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals, where confidence intervals not overlapping 1 are considered significant. Positive values indicate a features was more likely to be ranked highly. We used ranking levels of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5+, where 5+ contains rankings between 5 and 7. Technologist responses were dropped from the model due to low response rates and evaluated separately. Table 7 Factors a ecting collaboration ratings of practitioners and academic researchers. Odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals below 1 indicate a negative e ect of the predictor on the collaboration rating.

SM
Lack of partner communication had a strong negative e ect on collaboration ratings, while high costs had a marginal negative e ect. Animal Image Processing Automated species or individual animal identification from sensors ; distance to animal measurements, measures of weight/mass, bait detection "automated image processing for detecting animals in satellite and drone imagery"; "automated species recognition & individual ID on camera traps"; "ability to estimate density from camera traps for non-uniquely marked individuals"; "a device to record the mass of individual animals that pass in front of camera traps"; "AI that can recognize bait in camera traps"; "measurement of physiological variables in camera traps"

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Individual-level Monitoring Improvements to animal tracking devices and adaptations to measure individual animal behaviour and physiology "Miniaturized animal tracking technologies with extended battery life;" "camera system on animals which links to automated behaviour software" 24 Field Assays and Sample Collection sex assays from swabs, hormone analysis of samples, field-ready genetic analysis, dietary information from terrestrial "ID animals instantly as male/female from swabs/test strips"; "rapid hormone analysis"; "Near real time dietary vertebrate faecal isotope data, tool to collect hair samples and protect from moisture/weather; tag attachment/retrieval options that do not require capture and immobilization; tool to explore burrows; thermal nest cameras; stereo cameras for 3D wildlife images information from faecal isotope data"; "mechanism to collect hair samples for DNA analysis that would also protect those samples from moisture"; "Automated onsite parasite identification and quantification portable device"